No need for sugar coating it, the history of android tablets is rough. There are some exceptions. For example, Samsung has managed to carve out a nice market for itself in space, thanks to nice hardware and heavy Android tweaks. The Galaxy maker has secured a consistent No. 2 behind Apple – accounting for nearly a quarter of all shipments in Q1 2023, by IDC.

Things fall off abruptly from there. Huawei actually ranks third with about 7% of the market. That’s not surprising on a hardware quality basis, but the company’s highly publicized battle with the US government has let the company down. They’ve also pushed the company from its Android dependency to its homebrew, HarmonyOS.

Lenovo is the other major Android tablet maker in the top five; Amazon ranks fifth, but Fire OS doesn’t really qualify by most measures. The company excels in good, innovative hardware, while its tablets are divided into three operating systems: Android, Windows and Chrome.

We won’t elaborate again on why the operating system has struggled to match tablets in the same way it has with handsets, but we can certainly say it’s not for lack of trying. After an initial hesitation around hardware makers porting the mobile operating system to a larger form factor, Google started trialling Android tablets itself a little over a decade ago.

In 2012, the company teamed up with Asus on the Nexus 7 and Samsung for the Nexus 10. An HTC-built Nexus 9 arrived in 2014. The Pixel C was released the following year, amid a shift to first-party hardware after years of partnerships. A Pixel Slate arrived in 2018, with a shift to Chrome as Google’s tablet operating system of choice. Like its predecessors, it didn’t last long.

When the Pixel Tablet was first teased in 2022, one big question loomed over the rest: Why should it be any different this time? In addition to standard adoption issues, Google’s approach to the tablet category was mostly defined by intense indecision. Consumer electronics adoption is often slow and requires commitment. Over the years, you’ve had the unwavering sense that the Google hardware team threw up their hands in frustration with each subsequent swing.

When the Pixel Tablet was fully unveiled at I/O, the answer seemed to be: this time it will be different because the approach is different. The dock is the thing. Make no mistake. The dock is what makes the Pixel Tablet interesting. In fact, I’m more inclined to call it a Nest Home with a detachable screen than a Pixel tablet with a dock, though I’m sure Google wouldn’t be happy with that particular classification.

To be fair, when the Home Hub first launched, I wrote, “From a design standpoint, the product is best described as a 7-inch tablet resting on top of a speaker at an angle of ~25 to 30 degrees. ” More than any other smart display on the market at the time, Google’s resembled a small tablet grafted onto a speaker base. I can’t be the only one who felt equally compelled to see if I could delete it.

The Pixel Tablet is the obvious logical continuation of that design. Whether it is ultimately a tablet or smart screen is ultimately in the eyes of the user. What I will say is that Google made a smart decision in merging the two. At the moment, the tablet can even only be purchased as a bundle. Perhaps at some point users will want to buy the slate separately, but it’s hard to get excited about the device as a standalone right now.

It’s a solid piece of hardware. The device feels premium enough, and it outperforms the standard iPad on multiple accounts. The screen is 10.95 inches with a resolution of 2650 x 1600 – versus the 10th generation iPad’s 10.9 inch, 2360 x 1640 screen (the pixel has a slightly higher pixel density). The battery is rated at 12 hours, up to 10 hours from the iPad. It comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, up from the iPad’s 4GB and 64GB, respectively. The front and rear cameras are both eight megapixels, compared to 12 megapixels on the iPad.

In many ways, the Pixel tablet can best be understood as Google’s equivalent to the iPad at a basic level. It’s a flash-free utility device that does the things a tablet needs to do. It’s a product that Google could have hypothetically produced about a decade ago, rather than second-guessing its approach to space and leaving hardware partners like Samsung, Huawei and Lenovo to lunch.

But the Google of old always seemed to have an uneasy relationship with the idea of ​​first-party hardware. It preferred to let existing hardware companies do the heavy lifting. When it released its own device, it generally lacked follow-up. But a few important things have happened in the meantime:

1. Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion in 2014 and has spent the intervening years building out its smart home offerings, including several Home Hub devices.
2. The company went to the scorched earth on the Pixel division, bought a piece of HTC IP and rebuilt it from the ground up.
3. The company developed Android L, a variant of the operating system for larger screens – similar to iPadOS

The latter is in some ways the most essential. The company wasn’t entirely clear with messages as it fell in late 2021 (as evidenced by the obvious confusion in this post by my exceptionally rational colleague, Frederic). Android 12L was introduced in part to embrace the growing interest in foldable devices. It also gives developers a native way to bring Android to a tablet. It was quickly embraced by Samsung, Lenovo and Microsoft, among others.

It offers some key features such as a multitasking split screen that can be accessed from the taskbar. With that enabled, it’s easier to drag and drop media from Google Photos to apps.
Showcasing new software features has always been a fundamental underpinning of Google’s consumer hardware game, and there’s no reason to believe the Pixel tablet isn’t a direct outgrowth of that philosophy.

But coming out with a fine – if largely unusual – tablet in 2023 won’t be the magic bullet that finally undoes a decade of trying to establish yourself in the category. A combination of tablet/smart display/home hub, on the other hand, is an attractive proposition. The same goes for the price. Offering the Pixel tablet alone for $499 would also have been a hard sell. Unless you’re Samsung, you’ll need to price your system much more aggressively than Apple’s (the standard iPad starts at $449). Adding the speaker dock and Nest Home Hub functionality, on the other hand, sweetens the deal considerably.

Suddenly you have a device that straddles Google’s two primary consumer hardware divisions (Pixel, Nest) pretty well. Of course, Google isn’t the first to try this. Amazon is probably the best example, with Fire docks that double as Echo devices thanks to the “Show Mode” for FireOS. Google’s equivalent is Hub Mode.

By default, the system shows a rotating gallery of wallpapers. Once connected to the rest of your smart home devices, you can access a panel that centralizes the monitoring and control of lights, thermostats and the like. This can all be done without unlocking the device, although more sensitive things like security cameras will still require the unlock.

Hub mode is automatically enabled when you dock the system and snap it into place magnetically so that the charging pins are aligned (the system can also be charged via USB-C if the dock is not at hand). You will see a short animation letting you know it is working as planned. When you play music on the tablet, the track is then transferred to the dock’s speakers, which are considerably fuller than what you get with the slate. As with the Nest Hub, it’s a fun way to watch quick stuff like YouTube videos.

I certainly wouldn’t make it my primary device for watching movies or listening to music, but I’ve always found Nest hubs to be a great addition to better smart speakers like the Google Home Max (RIP?). It’s a great little visual media check for the music as it plays. You can use it with various services, including Spotify and Apple Music.

That’s one of the nice things about using an Android tablet versus a smart display: access to a huge app library. That means the docked tablet doubles as a handy little teleconferencing device for things like Google Meet and Zoom. The front camera and speakers are more than enough to get the job done.

With the launch of a new tablet in 2023, Google faced a hugely difficult task. It is an extremely mature category with established players. Like smartphones, tablets have largely improved to the point where they’re a bit boring, frankly. Convertibles have made a somewhat compelling case for continued creativity, but the slates themselves have fallen into a similarly iterative spec race. However, for the first time, Google understood the command. Any new hardware it would introduce had to be more than just a tablet. The Pixel isn’t the first tablet with smart home docking functionality, but it’s the first where that functionality feels more primal than in hindsight.

The Pixel tablet won’t set the world on fire, but in some ways Google has done the impossible: made a standard entry-level device interesting in the year of our lord, 2023.